An old Arabic folktale tells how a man standing one night by a river
is bored and starts throwing pebbles in the water. Just as dawn breaks,
he picks up the last pebble and as he throws it: he briefly looks at it.
As it flies through the air, he realises that it was a jewel.
A bag of jewels had been spilt on the river-bank,
and through ignorance he had thrown them all away
*.

We have a similar problem with butterflies and modern society.
We are destroying their foodplants and their habitat.
If our grandchildren and future generations
are to enjoy the wondrous nature of butterflies:
we need to allow Caterpillars to coexist with us in our society.

Caterpillars are the immature stages of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera).
At a recent count, Australia was home to 5 familes of butterflies
(containing about 400 named species),
and about 100 families of moths (containing over 10,000 named species,
with probably as many moth species again yet to be described).
Many of the Australian moths and butterflies are very beautiful,
and many of their caterpillars are even prettier
and more interesting than the their adult forms.
Caterpillars are also very tame and easy to catch,
and so make delightful
house pets.

Most
Australian Lepidoptera taxonomy and identification has been performed on
dead adult moths sent back to the British Museum in London
from Australia by the early explorers.
Meanwhile: most professional entomologists in Australia are employed to
study the control of the few species that are pests.
So for instance: there is no information at all on the
shapes, colours, and behaviour of the caterpillars of 90% of Australian moths.
So even amateurs can help discover these things by
collecting, photographing and
rearing in captivity
any caterpillars that they find in Australia.

Preserving caterpillars poses difficult problems.
This makes the identification of caterpillars difficult.
So: of the limited number of Australian Lepidoptera that have
known caterpillars: only a small number have been photographed,
and still fewer of such photos are on the web.
In an attempt to improve this situation: we have created these webpages
with all the pictures and links we can find about
caterpillars that occur in Australia.
The pictures come from ourselves and many colleagues,
from a wide variety of sources, and are of very varied quality.
We are still adding more pictures,
so watch the counts at the head of this webpage.

Whilst most species of caterpillars feed on leaves,
some burrow into the soil feeding on roots, some bore into trees
eating the wood, and caterpillars of some moths like
Scatochresis episema
feed on
Koala droppings.

The female moths of Australian species such as
Teia anartoides
have no wings, and the species disperses by
the young Caterpillars making an open gossamer sail out of silk,
and sailing away on it in the wind.

The fauna and
the flora of Australia are very different from those
in the rest of the world, and this is just as true of the Caterpillars
as it is of the better known Marsupials. With the short history of
European influence in Australia and only a small human population,
only a limited amount of work has been done on naming and
identifying the various species.

Of course, the Australian Aborigines knew a great deal about
Australian Lepidoptera, and they used
several species as sources of food, for example:

The scientific name for a Caterpillar is Larva (plural
Larvae). This name was taken from the Latin word
Larva meaning amongst other things 'Mask',
because Caterpillars could be thought of as masking
the butterflies and moths which they become.

Note: that we have adopted three unconventional conventions
in an attempt to make these webpages more understandable to non-entomologists:
1. all scientific names are in italics,
2. all taxonomical levels above genus (such as family, order, class)
are in capitals, and
3. all our pictures have the head to the left,
although that has required a left-right reflection of some of the photos.

We have generally followed the nomenclature and taxonomic divisions
as used in the erudite text :

We have a separate webpage for each species,
and links to these are available from a webpage for each family
as a thumbnail picture and a highlighted name.
The families are also linked from one webpage for
the moths and one for
the butterflies.
We have included lots of pictures of the adult butterflies and
moths also, even if we had no caterpillar pictures for those species.
In these cases, our thumbnail pictures show only an adult.
For some species we have found no pictures at all, but only some
descriptive text. In these cases, we show only a bullet by the
name, and the name is highlighted as the link.
Some species have been illustrated on
Australian postage stamps,
and some more widespread species of
Australian butterflies and
Australian moths
have appeared on overseas stamps.

Many caterpillars are very fussy eaters,
and eat only a very restricted range of plants or foodstuffs.
We have tried to include links for the known food sources of the
various caterpillars.
However, we only list those that we have observed,
those we have been told about by other observers,
and those reported in the literature.
In principle, the caterpillars might feed on anything
when nobody is looking.